Many gamers are primarily interested in upgrading their graphics card – this depends to a significant extent on gaming performance. But without a powerful enough processor and quality motherboard, expensive GPUs won't bring much effect. Howtogeek.com portal speak about older processors that owners should consider upgrading.
AMD Zen 1
AMD's first generation seems to have launched almost yesterday, but in reality, they've been around since 2017 – these chips are quite old. The early days of the Zen architecture marked the end of a long drought at AMD, and while the CPUs themselves were quite good, their performance and functionality lagged behind the latest Zen architectures. APUs that only offer eight PCIe lanes to graphics cards like the Ryzen 3 2200G are especially limited, as any GPU upgrade will immediately hit bottlenecks due to low bandwidth.
The Zen 1 chip was released on the AM4 socket, which has been supported by AMD for several generations. For those who can't afford to upgrade to something like the Ryzen 5700X3d, you could consider the cheap Ryzen 5 3600 – it'll even be many times better than the old Zen 1 CPU.
Intel Core i5-6600K
Before AMD launched Ryzen, Intel Skylake processors were leading the sales charts. They are considered the de facto standard, and the overclocked Intel Core i5-6600K is the top of the line. The quad-core CPU launched in 2015 and is a worthy competitor to some of the chips that came out later, but its 3.9GHz clock speed wasn't enough to compensate for the small number of busses in the game.
Unfortunately, the i5-6600K is a very old processor and Intel doesn't support its sockets as well as AMD does. The only reasonable upgrade for those who don't want to build a completely new computer is a used i7-6700K. It's better in every way, and the four extra buses should give a noticeable performance boost in new games.
Intel Core i5-4460
The Intel Core i5-4460 suffers from the same limitations as the 6600K – four buses, four cores. The only difference is that the i5-4460 is inferior in all other characteristics. Older architecture, low clock speeds, lack of overclocking capabilities. This chip went on sale back in 2014, so by today's standards it's really ancient, but Intel dominated the market at the time. As a result, the i5-4460 and other Haswell processors continue to be a popular choice for low-cost PC builds.
The i5-4460 can handle esports and less recent games like League of Legends and Red Dead Redemption 2, but it will still bottleneck most modern graphics cards. Additionally, Intel stopped supporting these chips in 2021, so they stopped receiving updates and security fixes.
Intel Core i7-2600K
The legendary chip of 2011. At the time of release, the 2600K and its slightly faster replacement, the i7-2700K, were among the best consumer CPUs on the market. They became a hit among gamers and content creators, which is why some people still use them to this day.
Although the i7-2600K offers 8 buses and 4 cores, it also uses a significantly older architecture than the i5-6600K and i5-4460. In fact, this is an ancient Sandy Bridge processor assembled according to the 32 nm standard, so in terms of performance and energy efficiency it is far different from modern analogues. Intel stopped supporting this CPU in 2019, which was already a clear hint of the need for an upgrade.
Its 2600K and slow DDR3 RAM simply cannot handle the demands of current games, no matter how much you overclock it. The output will inevitably have constant micro-freezes, slow load times, latency, and low fps. Like other older chips, among new games it can only handle esports titles and indie projects, and even there performance won't be ideal.
AMD FX-8350
Before the launch of Ryzen, AMD processors had difficulty keeping up with the capabilities of Intel products. One of the most popular chips of the time was the FX-8350, its main selling point being its eight physical cores clocked at 4 GHz. When overclocked – more than 4.2 GHz.
But as impressive as the numbers are on paper, in reality the FX-8350's performance never reached Intel chip levels. Compared to Sandy Bridge, this CPU has poor single-core performance, poor IPC, and high memory latency. It also has a TDP of 125 W and is built on the Piledriver architecture, which makes the chip very hot and needs good cooling.
It probably doesn't need to be explained that the FX-8350 wasn't a good choice back in the day. By today's standards, it's actually pretty bad. It doesn't matter which video card it works with – most modern games are beyond its capabilities. And considering the price of used laptops, it's easier to use something like this for work than to build one on the FX-8350.
